Woodman's financial success is more than a decade in the making. He founded GoPro in 2004, initially just making wrist straps for small cameras and then eventually branching out into building the hardware itself.

Woodman's high-school classmates remember him as being immensely passionate, waking up at five in the morning to go surfing before classes. "Now professional content is inspiring kids around the world to pursue their passions, just like I was inspired by those Surfer magazine tear outs on the wall," he told UCSD's alumni magazine.

After building his first startup, a web marketing company that eventually flopped during the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, Woodman decided to fund his next venture himself. He moved back in with his parents and traveled up and down the California coast in a Volkswagen Westfalia van called "The Biscuit," where he worked on the first GoPro wrist straps and cameras.

Woodman sold his first GoPro cameras in surf shops and even on QVC, which he appeared on several times in GoPro's early days. Here he is on the home shopping network in 2005, three years after creating the first GoPro. "It was very humble beginnings for GoPro, but I think it's the right kind of beginning," he told Outside.

Once GoPro started taking off, the company bought a Lotus Exige, which Woodman would use to test the latest camera straps and mounts. "He'd spend all day going 130 miles per hour around the Infineon track. He was basically the product test engineer," Neil Dana, Woodman's friend and GoPro's first hire said to Inc.

Footage of him racing in his F1000 car ended up in a national commercial for GoPro.

And here's a look at another GoPro race car he's been spotted driving.

Woodman is famously high-energy. He has said he was inspired by Red Bull both as a lifestyle brand and as a fuel for creativity. He told Fortune that when he was starting GoPro, he "became enamored with the brand. And I was drinking a lot of Red Bull — I’m not kidding, getting a company off the ground isn’t easy."

Woodman's longtime passion for surfing has remained central to his company. In 2014, GoPro announced a sponsorship of the Association of Surfing Professionals. The legendary Kelly Slater is among twenty or so surfers on the company's surf team.

Woodman has been known to take GoPro's Gulfstream jet on trips to exotic locations, where he can show off what the latest GoPro devices can do. Here, he takes some of the company's early employees on a ski trip to Montana.

Though GoPro's stock has fluctuated over the past year, Woodman currently has an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion.

Woodman and his wife, Jill, live in Woodside, California, with their two adorable young boys.

The couple donated a whopping $500 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2014. The gift, which will reportedly go towards creating the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation, made Woodman one of the biggest donors in the tech industry last year.

Over the past decade, GoPro has become the go-to camera for extreme sports enthusiasts, and it's been used to capture some incredible moments. Here South African animal expert Kevin Richardson gets up close and personal with a lion.